Google’s Quantum Leap Shrinks Timeline for Cracking Bitcoin and RSA Encryption

A fresh research paper from Google’s quantum team just reignited concerns about the future of cryptographic security—and crypto holders might want to pay attention. The paper reveals that quantum computers may need 20 times fewer resources than previously estimated to break RSA encryption, the algorithm securing everything from online banking to Bitcoin wallets.

Craig Gidney, a quantum researcher at Google, unveiled the breakthrough in a recent blog post, noting that a 2048-bit RSA key could be cracked in under a week by a quantum computer with fewer than one million noisy qubits. That’s a dramatic leap from the 2019 projection of 20 million qubits and an eight-hour attack window.

So what changed? According to Google, the quantum speed-up comes from a combination of smarter algorithms and enhanced error correction. Notably, improvements in modular exponentiation calculations and a more compact logical qubit architecture helped reduce the quantum burden. The team also optimized a technique called "magic state cultivation"—a method to improve the reliability of key quantum resources called T states.

While Bitcoin doesn’t use RSA directly—it relies on elliptic curve cryptography (ECC)—the implications are still massive. ECC is structurally similar and susceptible to Shor’s algorithm, the quantum procedure capable of breaking it. If quantum computers can tackle RSA faster, Bitcoin's cryptographic foundations may be more vulnerable—and sooner—than expected.

Gidney emphasized that these attacks aren’t possible today. Current machines, like IBM’s 1,121-qubit Condor or Google’s own 53-qubit Sycamore, are still far from capable of maintaining the necessary coherence or running for the days required. But the trajectory is accelerating. With IBM targeting a 100,000-qubit system by 2033 and Quantinuum aiming for a fault-tolerant machine by 2029, the timeline for crypto disruption is shrinking fast.

In response, the crypto world isn’t standing still. Solana developers have rolled out a quantum-resistant vault using hash-based signatures, while Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin floated the idea of a hard fork to adopt quantum-secure algorithms. Google, for its part, is already encrypting internal and Chrome traffic with ML-KEM, a standardized post-quantum algorithm.

The broader concern? Quantum threats extend far beyond cryptocurrencies. RSA encryption underpins global communications, digital identities, and financial infrastructure. Adversaries might already be harvesting encrypted data today to decrypt in the future—a tactic known as “harvest now, decrypt later.”

To test how urgent this all is, Project 11, a quantum research group, has placed an $85,000 bounty on cracking even simplified Bitcoin-style encryption. They’re starting small, but they’re monitoring how quickly progress scales.

The U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has called for retiring vulnerable cryptographic systems by 2030. But Google’s findings suggest that timeline might already be too conservative.